FCC To investigate Comcast Bittorrent Meddling 196
An anonymous reader writes "FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said Tuesday that the commission will investigate complaints that Comcast actively interferes with Internet traffic as its subscribers try to share files online. A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency in November to stop Comcast from discriminating against certain types of data and to fine Comcast $195,000 for every affected subscriber. While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year, in which reporters tested and verified the data blocking."
Who is behind on their payments? (Score:5, Interesting)
I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.
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Then again, i did forget this was slashdot. Receiving new data isnt the object of the exercise for some.
Re:Who is behind on their payments? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now.. you may ask why do I think Martin has a thing against the CableCo's in particular while all about helping the Bells? Let's see... he's authorized the AT&T Merger with BellSouth, helping to recreate one of the largest utility monopolies and the largest ISP out there.....Yet then starts trying to force a 70%/70% ruling on the Cable Companies in order to try and gain additional control over the Cable Industry. He then tries to cap the amount of the market which the CableCo can own at 30% (Call me crazy... but I'm pretty sure some of the bells already have that percentage, if not more....).
There's also the whole factor of Franchise agreements. For YEARS (Decades even), In order for a cable company to come into a town, they had to negotiate with the local government for the Franchise. This Franchise agreement included payments to the local Gov'ment, Community Access channels, and honestly, a little bit of a way for the local community to excert pressure on the cableco to provide decent service thru the renewal process. (although admittedly few Gov'ments truly exercised this ability like they could've). When the Bells started wanting to offer TV service thru FIOS or AT&T's UniverseTV product, they discovered they would be legally required to negotiate with the local communities Franchising groups in order to be able to offer service. They didn't like this Idea....So they had the FCC remove the local community's ability to control who could offer service in their community by allowing the Bell's to instead get a state-wide Franchise. (Time Warner has appearently taken advantage of this ruling in Wisconsin by applying for and getting a state-wide Franchise in that state..).
Besides removing a large hurdle for the Bell's to now offer Television services at well, it removed the local community's ability to force the providers to offer local access television. (Gov'ment billboards for announcements, classic Public Access TV, etc).
What I'm also wondering about is how He authorizes a large merger so we basically now have only 3? Large national telcos (Verizon, AT&T, Quest.....with other rural players and 2nd teir players like Embarq). He removes a large barrier for them to enter the TV market.... and after at least one CableCo takes advantage of that removal, He then starts trying to limit the amount of the market which the Cable-Co's can be in.
Needless to say.... I don't believe Martin is necessarily doing anything out of the goodness of his heart, or because "it's the right thing to do"..... But even if his motives aren't exactly the best, if his agreeing to look into this helps set a legal precedent for Network Neutrality... I'm all for it. (It might be interesting to see however if he either chickens out on being severe in the punishment.... or even kinda let the issue slip to a back-burner to be forgotten about, rather than do something that can bite the Telco's in the butt later.)
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The details are certainly not proof positive, but they are certainly indicative. Correlation != causation and all, but i hear ya.
Re:Who is behind on their payments? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think "wishy-washy" is generous. In my opinion he's not "wishy-washy", he's an administration corporate servant. The only reason that he's said he will investigate is that he thinks that will show the public that he is following his job description...minimally. If you think that his investigation will find that Comcast consumers have been denied their rights then think again. The quote I saw in another article today stated quite specifically that he knows and feels that providers have the right to "manage their traffic". I can just about guarantee that the FCC will find that "in the interests of all users, those sharing files (even if legitimate) must have their traffic delayed in order to provide the best service to all users". He won't even think about exploring the fact that providers over-promise services and should instead upgrade their infrastructure to provide those services as promised versus putting the brakes on traffic that might compromise overall end user satisfaction. What a crock.
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Given the recent stories related to chairman Kevin Martin, one has to wonder if this is fitting a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense or just that cable companies havent kept up their "lobbying" efforts or stepped on some toes.
I sincerely hope its the former, but i'm cynical enough to expect the latter.
Myself, given how much the current administration is in the pocket of large businesses, I have to wonder if this is a hearing to consider making said content screwovers mandatory for all ISPs.
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It would seem the screwovers are mainly for the cableco's this round.
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But then again, i know its way too much to expect slashdot readers to think at all >70% these days.
Get off the kneejerk bandwagons and think for yourselves people.
Comcast == evil; (Score:5, Funny)
I really do not see the Republican controlled FCC doing anything about this, however it is a good start to at least say they are investigating.
Has nothing to do with Republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
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If we have a democratic president, we'll start blaming (and whip out our brooms) him and the democrats if these shenanigans continue.
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Re:Has nothing to do with Republicans (Score:5, Funny)
Hold on there skippy!
You're fooling no one with your obvious attempt to shift blame away from the Demoblicans.
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I prefer the Futurama parties: Fingerlicans and Tastycrats.
Republican? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, the biggest government whores for the entertainment industry are generally Democrats, led by Berman and Hollings (the latter thankfully recently retired).
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Hah. That has very little to do with principles and more with return-on-investment. Hollywood is in California, a traditionally blue state. There's more to be gained this way.
Not that it's right.
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Re:Comcast == evil; (Score:5, Interesting)
Sucks all around.
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i.e, people using bittorrent == cash for them (in reduced external network costs) at least thats how I understand it. If the torrents are between two comcast customers then they would be able to charge both customers for the bandwidth wi
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Re:Comcast == evil; (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless Comcast wants to start paying me rent for running their cable along the edge of my back yard (their piece of the utility easement).
Wrong (Score:2)
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This role has shifted somewhat to the state and feds but can still be controlled by the local governments to some degree.
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I think it stinks, but it's their network. They can do what they want. You are free to take your business elsewhere.
Fine. In that case they can utilize their network without having any of their cables cross public property. They're free to either sell the current cables to the government at a price the government demands or they can remove the cables without causing any damage to the public property (i.e. Any damage they cause by digging up the cables they own they must immediately pay to be fixed).
Our property, our rules. They can take their business elsewhere if they don't like it.
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Mind you, Verizon stubbornly insist my house doesn't exist (and this is downtown Tacoma, not some new subdivision). So I'll stick with the ci
THANK GOD ... maybe (Score:3, Interesting)
I really hope something comes of this... I think it could go either way really, the FCC could certainly side Comcast on the issue. But even if we could get some more truth in advertising in the business I would be happy. Let people know what services you intend to affect.
Or my personal favorite, not knowing how much bandwidth you're payments actually cover. About half way through the afternoon I drop to 1/6th to 1/8th my 'normal' bandwidth. Till midnight and BAM full speed again... And believe me it don't take much, one DVD
Are they doing this everywhere? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm on Comcast, I have a normal residential account afaik, but I can download torrents fine. Pretty speedy too.
I don't doubt some people are having problems but how is it I'm not?
Re:Are they doing this everywhere? (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm on Comcast in South NJ.
Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence.
Re:Are they doing this everywhere? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Are they doing this everywhere? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was because it was going off traffic patterns that people were reporting problems with programs such as lotus notes as well.
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I have noticed the following while using Comcast's service: As I said before, encrypted torrent traffic seems to work fine, but once things start seeding, all traffic that is not encrypted gets throttled, which includes port 80 packets... this I find very annoying, but I bet if a person sets up a encrypted tunnel outside of Comcast's network, then one can overt this tactic.
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See that really sounds more like your friend's router crashed for about an hour.
You know, this is embarrassing, but I think you're right, now that I think about it. (I spent most of the summer convinced that Comcast was evil, then I discovered a bad network cable toward the end of the summer. I then conveniently forgot about the network cable and continued to think Comcast was evil.) Man, I need to stop spreading FUD... But I still don't know why this (very physical) problem only seemed to occur when the line was under heavy use.
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They don't really give a shit at all. They barely (or don't) maintian their infrastructure, and they don't pay attention to (or don't care) about over-population of certain areas. If you're lucky, you're living somewhere where comcast put in a big enough pipe, and recently enough that it hasn't degraded yet. If you're not, your QoS sucks.
That's just they way it's been looking to me, I could be wrong.
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Way back when it was MediaOne and then AT&T Broadband, the service was terrible. It was bad enough that the routers had to be frequently rebooted, but the routing was frequently screwed up. Screwed up enough that I had to e-mail them a traceroute of two router
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Agreed. I own an RCA DCW615 cable modem, and have run into the issue where I can no longer control it[1], because Comcast has sent some specific data down the wire to change its function from "Residential Gateway" mode to "Cable Modem" mode. I don't know a whole lot about this, but you can see from this post [speedguide.net] that several others have run into the issue.
I called them last week to ask about this
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Re:Are they doing this everywhere? (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance.... I know Adelphia was split between Time Warner and Comcast a few years ago. Adelphia may have had 1 way which they designed their cable network and backend systems. The aquiring company may have another. Making ANY changes is a slow and drawn out process because you have to be VERY careful to avoid any negative customer impact. (IOW's... you can't just unplug a system from one network and instantly plug it into another. You could risk customer outages.. breaking networks because a router is on the wrong VLAN or ip collisioning with another item on the new network.). i'd honestly thing that throwing something like Sandvine would be more of a clean-up/tweaking of the network kind of job, after you've got everything working and talking on a common network. Not something you'd just throw in there off the bat, and then try to get everything up to the standards everything else is on.
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And, in fact, it looks like that's exactly what they're doing. [slashdot.org] How does it feel to have made such an accurate prediction?
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when thinking ISP you need to think last mile. an last mile traffic has been for a very long time pull traffic ( while a web site is push ). P2P has upset the apple cart ( and has become a big thorn, leading to net neutrality issues ).
Peering agreements for a long time have been rather stale, last mile pays a percentage and web site host pay a percentage. Peering locations pushed and pulled rather balanced ( if it's off then someone
Ah, justice (Score:2)
$195,000 per affected subscriber? Wow! Comcast won't be able to afford that 160mbps network upgrade if that occurs.
This should be an interesting story to watch unfold. Let's see how Comcast denies and hides it. Too bad this isn't a class action suit that would return some of that money to the victims... I mean customers. Maybe a class action suit will follow if or when the FCC finds Comcast guilty.
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A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency
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A little touchy there, I must say.
Ok, so I made the mistake of saying it was the FCC, but saying that "A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars asked the agency" still doesn't answer where the figure came from (as in, why $192,000 and not $193,000). If you know the answer to the real question, I would be happy if you told me. Otherwise, I'm really not interested.
IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT! (Score:5, Interesting)
including random drops of google gtalk voice communications.
random drops of game connections.
and maybe more. those are just two i've noticed a problem with on comcast. and those two happen ALOT more often if any bit torrent downloader is running. even the damm wow updater.
its just wrong when its bit torrent. but it wont hurt anything. bit torrent keeps plugging away. but when it happens to the other apps... it's fucking annoying AND wrong.
Re:IT'S NOT JUST BIT TORRENT! (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen occaisional SSH connections drop since I started on Comcast. That never happened on dial-up. What it appears to me that they are doing is just taking a small sampling of packets ... such as maybe 1 in 10000. Then it adds the connetion tuple (host:port of each end) to a big hash table without concern of replacements. If the connection was already in the table and is seen again, it forges the RST packet. It won't happen on web connections hardly ever. On connections that last a long time AND have a lot of traffic, it gradually kills them off. It could work with quite few resources that way. For example, a PC could never handle the load of the flow through a backbone router. But if it merely got a small fraction sampling, it would gradually drop most long lived busy connections. Use IPsec to avoid it or make connections automatically restart (like BT already does).
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What Comcast is doin
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Could you elaborate on that? I've been having issues with TF2 recently and wonder if it's related - random 10-15 seconds "timeouts" in which everything seizes up and won't move...
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To net neutrality naysayers: told you so. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, bandwidth is not unlimited... (Score:5, Insightful)
But the cable companies market it as if it were.
They chose to use the term unlimited usage, and if they don't want to offer unlimited access, they should change their TOS.
There's nothing criminal or unethical about expecting a company to provide what it has promised. Some of us would be quite willing to pay, say, only $10 per month for a 1.3 Mbs connection, even if it came with a 5 GB/month transfer cap. But the cable companies won't do that. Instead, you have to buy their unlimited plan, and pay for bandwidth that you don't even use.
And the cable company will happily resell your unused bandwidth to others. It's called capacity planning, and they use statistical analysis to figure out the bandwidth that most people will actually use. Problem is, they have a financial interest in fully utilizing their equipment, i.e., buying only as much as needed. Which, when their estimates are wrong, results in lousy service for customers. Your problem is not that you are paying for someone else's bandwidth, but rather, that the cable company is making you pay for bandwidth they don't expect you to use.
Your torrent-hosting neighbor is simply using all of the bandwidth for which he paid. He's not using yours. (That is, unless he's owned your box, but that's a different thread entirely...)
Yeah, and your cheque's in the mail (Score:2)
Time Warp (Score:2)
While known for months in tech circles, the issue wasn't given broad attention until an Associated Press report last year,
Can't slip anything by those techies...
Re:Time Warp (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't know about you, but for me, nine days ago was last year.
So was 'over a year ago.' :-P
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We need this in Canada (Score:4, Informative)
Rogers Cable has been doing this here for sometime. After people found that encrypted proxies could get around their blocking, they began to block all VPNs. Since that time, their policy has essentially been that only HTTP traffic is guaranteed to be highspeed. Ever since they decided to be a phone company with IP phones over cable, the quality of their internet service has suffered badly.
If Canada had the power to fine Rogers in amounts like Comcast is being threatened with, that would be a mighty big stick in the hands of the gov't and consumers. Unfortunately, we don't have anything like this as AFAIK so bandwidth throttling is practiced by most of the big ISPs
Re:We need this in Canada (Score:5, Insightful)
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This may be a stupid question or at a least a little late - but didn't a read here on
Cool. I'm waiting for my 195 grand... (Score:2)
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the only way you'll see any money is if *you* sue them or if this becomes a class action suit.
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The courts and comcast will fight a long battle, and ultimately comcast will "settle" the issue with FCC by "agreeing" to not throttle P2P for another 2 years and a public apology. That will be all.
All this talk of 195K is for m0rons like you and me.
Corporates are of an higher caste.
Oh BTW, comcast will deduct all lawyer fees from its tax bundle thus reducing its tax to the State further.
And the FCC would pay our tax money to lawyers to fight a losing battle.
I say dissolve FCC and let the market open
Time Warner Roadrunner (Score:3, Informative)
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Moving soon (Score:2)
I'm looking forward to the opportunity of voting with my dollar. Fuck you, Comcast.
it's working fine for me (Score:2, Interesting)
Hello Mr. "Law" (Score:4, Funny)
Please meet Mr. "Unintended Consequences".
Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh* Well, I guess I can expect my cable fees to go up again. I wonder if this will be called a "Federal cost recovery fee" as a line item on my bill.
interesting to watch for those of us overseas (Score:2)
it'll be interesting to watch the outcome to see what precedent will be set that we can exploit here.
I always thought that something like rapidshare or megashares would take off for distributing large content like demo games and linux ISOs, but the reality is that there are so many file sharing sites out there that the only way one will become a "standard" is if it is free, and currently all http file shari
The way around Comcast is full encryption (Score:2)
I would guess THAT must be the real pressure to end this.
Life long lasting Impression (Score:4, Insightful)
Awhile back a big brewhaha went down with my local cable company and they scheduled a hearing with the government oversight committee. A FCC type local commission that governed the cable company monopoly.
I tuned in 10 minutes late but watched the hearing. for 40 minutes I watched 5 cable company executives on the bench defend their actions against accusations from the committee.
What I messed in the first 10 minutes were the introductions. I was wrong. The accuations were coming from the consumers. The five on the bench were the commission. There are certain epiphanies in life that just stick.
I have zero faith this FCC "investigation" will result in anything but new laws that forbid the consumer from exposing proprietary company practices with stiff fines and jail sentances for bloggers, etc. who expose company secrets. Maybe a new law making packet sniffing illegal. They'll figure something out.
-[d]-
Why BitTorrent? (Score:2)
C'mon you nerds. Why are you still using BitTorrent?
I pay about £0.15 per gigabte for my downloads, to an American company, who is obviously making a profit because they've been in business for years.
A whole album costs £0.02 to download. It takes a minute or two. Always at the same speed. No uploading apart from, I guess, acknowledging packet receipts. It takes me longer to extract the RARs sometimes...
I'd tell you how, but you're all supposed to be nerds and the first rule of U***** is y
I see a Comcast troll! (Score:2)
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Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent? (Score:4, Insightful)
In return however the ISP should provide the service being paid for. If you are paying £X for X 'Speed' with 'unlimited downloads', then that should be what you get, whether by simply browsing the web, watching on-line video, listening to on-line radio or seeding the latest Debian ISO's as a torrent (I'm seeding the whole lot at the moment because I feel I should use the bandwidth I have...).
Peer-to-peer traffic is not client-server traffic, and it is normally non commercial, and as to whether it is legitimate content being passed is not a concern of the ISP anyway (do they block spam, viral or malicious code, libellous comments? No. If there are terms and conditions attached to a service those should be clear (that way a customer can make an informed choice), there is nothing wrong with an ISP preventing end users from running a given type of server or use the connection in a certain way, but it must be clear when the user signs up.
Lastly, it is up to the Linux distributions how they distribute their ISO's, Bittorrent is perfect for this even if other methods are available and have been (and are) used, so your comment relating to how Linux should b distributed is slightly valid, but unfair and short sighted, especially given that those organisations providing Linux distributions are not all corporations so splitting the load is sensible. Bittorrent *is* used by people who wish to transfer material in breach of copyright because it is fast, practical and can be fairly anonymous but that is not its sole purpose and it is just as easy to use other methods to distribute that material as it would be to use alternate methods to distribute Linux.
People who distribute material in breach of copyright law should be punished to the full extent of the law (even if the law in question is at this point fairly insane), they are aware of the penalty's and still take the risk of doing it, but there is no good reason to ban a whole slew of technologies because they can be used to facilitate distribution. By that logic any uncontrolled storage medium that allows itself to be written to, and any uncontrolled method of data transmission should be banned, we would end up with computers that have similar multimedia capabilities as TV's (without PVR's/DVD players etc..) and radios (without a tape/MD deck), with the added benefit of having to pay for everything on a PAYG basis.
*Any Slasdhotters that have ever worked in technical support for an ISP will be familiar with calls from customers on the cheapest residential deals demanding their connection be fixed because their business relies on it, whilst simultaneously threatening lawsuits...
PS, not sure if the parent was intended as flamebait so I assumed not, and sorry for losing the plot halfway through.
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BitTorrent is absolutely not anonymous at all. Anyone in the world can connect to the tracker and get a list of IP addresses which are currently in the swarm, and then c
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Re:Who cares if they block BitTorrent? (Score:5, Insightful)
and you are told single car only now what $station doesn't know is you drive a SUV
and you drive a lot so you are clicking what would be $90.00 bills almost daily so
instead of asking you to switch to a larger plan or tell you that you getting to much
they start dropping the octane on your gas to say 30 octane (from the 87 you are supposed to get)
or they always seem to have problems with the pump you are at.
For a Gas station these would be suicide (and in the octane case a felony) why is it okay for ISPs?
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Except in this case, Comcast advertised many of the features of a truck, but then had a limited supply of trucks which they had oversold, so started giving out compact cars to customers instead...
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Backbone identification/allocation and latency mitigation...
Sure I can build a wireless mesh that's 500 hops deep in diameter, but if I'm on one edge trying to reach the other edge, even if I'm only 250 hops end to end, what the hell happens?
In most designs, the packet gets dropped somewhere between 50-255 hops...
Even protocols with good testing (OLSR) have problems upwards of 500 nodes.
(Which is why they're
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In fact, I can reliably see ssh sessions last for a while in text mode, and then die within seconds of using a port forward to throw back vnc from my workstation at work. Text mode ones die too, but they last longer.
The
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